1. Field of Invention
The invention relates to methods and systems for creating aesthetically pleasing visual image summaries from a collection of images.
2. Description of Related Art
The Manga technique creates visual video summaries by segmenting a video, determining an importance score for each segment, and selecting a keyframe for each sufficiently important segment of the video. The keyframes are assigned one of three sizes corresponding to the importance of the represented segment. The Magna technique, considering each row independently of the other rows, places the keyframes into rows of different heights where the possible row heights correspond to the possible keyframe sizes. Rows are completely filled by changing the keyframe sizes. The Manga technique determines a layout for each row so that the sizes of as few image as possible are changed.
There are many cases in which the summaries that result from the Manga technique are not as visually pleasing as desired. The Manga technique has a tendency to use many images of the same size rather than produce a combination of varying size. Furthermore, the Magna technique is unable to exactly fill a requested area. While the width of a layout determined according to the Magna technique may be specified, the height of the layout is dependent on the characteristics of the summarized video. Finally, the Magna technique uses only three different input sizes and frequently must resize an image by two sizes to make the image fit into the layout.